The transformation of the experience: that is pure art.

You try not to talk about the past too much as an artist. Instead, you focus on the continuity of your work.

The transformation of the experience: that is pure art.

Méret Oppenheim was a very erotic woman. She also liked provocation, and if you could provoke surrealists at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, or similar Dadaist hangouts in Basel, where you could normally get away with these things, you were truly a provocateur.

I always did drawings. Then, few years ago, I started working with large-scale paper. It's an extension of performance, because the pieces are the size of my full body. I use pencils, acrylic, watercolors, and I also incorporate textual messages. I did most of them in a monastery in Spain at the top of a mountain. I lived there a bit like a monk. I meditate quite often. At night, which is when I like to work, I like to think I have conversations with Francisco Goya. He died so many years ago, of course, but somehow, his ghost is always with me.

This idea of the body as a feast, it stems from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, moves to Viennese artists like Günter Brus, and then you have Salvador Dalí of course, then much later, Marina Abramović and Ulay, with their nude series in Italy. It's an ongoing conversation. There was nothing cruel about Méret's Oppenheim piece.

Of course at that time, especially here in America, we were dealing with women's liberation. Things weren't so easy then. Méret Oppenheim wasn't so directly involved in this - she was in her 60s at that point. She found her strength through competing with the great male artists of her time; Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.